It was back in 1990 that I set out on a project in memetic
engineering. The Nazi-comparison meme, I'd decided, had gotten out of
hand - in countless Usenet newsgroups, in many conferences on the
Well, and on every BBS that I frequented, the labeling of posters or
their ideas as "similar to the Nazis" or "Hitler-like" was a recurrent
and often predictable event. It was the kind of thing that made you
wonder how debates had ever occurred without having that handy
rhetorical hammer.

Not everyone saw the comparison to Nazis as a "meme" - most people on
the Net, as elsewhere, had never heard of "memes" or "memetics." But
now that we're living in an increasingly information-aware culture,
it's time for that to change. And it's time for net.dwellers to make a
conscious effort to control the kinds of memes they create or
circulate.

A "meme," of course, is an idea that functions in a mind the same way
a gene or virus functions in the body. And an infectious idea (call it
a "viral meme") may leap from mind to mind, much as viruses leap from
body to body.

When a meme catches on, it may crystallize whole schools of thought.
Take the "black hole" meme, for instance. As physicist Brandon Carter
has commented in Stephen Hawkings's A Brief History of Time: A
Reader's Companion: "Things changed dramatically when John Wheeler
invented the term [black hole]...Everybody adopted it, and from then
on, people around the world, in Moscow, in America, in England, and
elsewhere, could know they were speaking about the same thing." Once
the "black hole" meme became commonplace, it became a handy source of
metaphors for everything from illiteracy to the deficit.

By 1990, I had noticed, something similar had happened to the
Nazi-comparison meme. Sure, there are obvious topics in which the
comparison recurs. In discussions about guns and the Second Amendment,
for example, gun-control advocates are periodically reminded that
Hitler banned personal weapons. And birth-control debates are
frequently marked by pro-lifers' insistence that abortionists are
engaging in mass murder, worse than that of Nazi death camps. And in
any newsgroup in which censorship is discussed, someone inevitably
raises the specter of Nazi book-burning.

But the Nazi-comparison meme popped up elsewhere as well - in general
discussions of law in misc.legal, for example, or in the EFF
conference on the Well. Stone libertarians were ready to label any
government regulation as incipient Nazism. And, invariably, the
comparisons trivialized the horror of the Holocaust and the social
pathology of the Nazis. It was a trivialization I found both illogical
(Michael Dukakis as a Nazi? Please!) and offensive (the millions of
concentration-camp victims did not die to give some net.blowhard a
handy trope).

So, I set out to conduct an experiment - to build a counter-meme
designed to make discussion participants see how they are acting as
vectors to a particularly silly and offensive meme...and perhaps to
curtail the glib Nazi comparisons.

I developed Godwin's Law of Nazi Analogies: As an online discussion
grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or
Hitler approaches one.

I seeded Godwin's Law in any newsgroup or topic where I saw a
gratuitous Nazi reference. Soon, to my surprise, other people were
citing it - the counter-meme was reproducing on its own! And it
mutated like a meme, generating corollaries like the following:

Gordon's Restatement of Newman's Corollary to Godwin's Law:
Libertarianism (pro, con, and internal faction fights) is the
primordial net.news discussion topic. Any time the debate shifts
somewhere else, it must eventually return to this fuel source.

Morgan's Corollary to Godwin's Law: As soon as such a comparison
occurs, someone will start a Nazi-discussion thread on alt.censorship.

Sircar's Corollary: If the Usenet discussion touches on
homosexuality or Heinlein, Nazis or Hitler are mentioned within three
days.

Van der Leun's Corollary: As global connectivity improves, the
probability of actual Nazis being on the Net approaches one.

Miller's Paradox: As a network evolves, the number of Nazi
comparisons not forestalled by citation to Godwin's Law converges to
zero.

In time, discussions in the seeded newsgroups and discussions seemed
to show a lower incidence of the Nazi-comparison meme. And the
counter-meme mutated into even more useful forms. (As Cuckoo's Egg
author Cliff Stoll once said to me: "Godwin's Law? Isn't that the law
that states that once a discussion reaches a comparison to Nazis or
Hitler, its usefulness is over?") By my (admittedly low) standards,
the experiment was a
success.